Paul Menard and the No. 21 Menards/Cardell Cabinets team bounced back from a mid-race penalty for an uncontrolled tire on a pit stop to score a solid 12th-place finish in Sunday’s Drydene 400 at Dover International Speedway.
Menard started the race from the 13th position and was rarely out of the top 15 for the entire race.
He ended the first 120-lap Stage in 11th place but had to go to the rear for the restart to serve a pit road penalty.
Despite a long, 120-lap, caution-free stage he managed to stay on the lead lap until the waning laps of Stage Two. Still, he held the “Lucky Dog” spot until the end of the stage, which allowed him to restart the third and final segment of the race from 14th place.
Menard moved up two spots in a caution-free third segment to finish 12th, his 14th top-15 finish this season.
Eddie Wood said he was proud of the job Menard and the team did at Dover.
“Paul did a great job of staying in the hunt in a race where there were only three cautions and two of them were for the ends of the stages,” Wood said. “It can be unlucky to wish for a caution because it might be for you, but it would have been interesting to see how we wound up if there had been a couple of yellows in the last half of the race.”
Menard and the No. 21 team now head to Talladega Superspeedway for next Sunday’s 1000bulbs.com 500.
WBR PR
